Reading · Steph The Founder

The best succinct + fun weekly newsletter to learn about all the best things you need to know across tech, startups, VC, AI, etc, sent out every Monday. (and at the minimum, it will include the links I post about every week on instagram!). Feedback? Things I should add? Respond back here or comment below x

what i’m reading this morning:
- FT article “How much value is AI really creating?”
- the paper “writing code vs shipping code” also mentioned in the article (and responsible for the below chart)

How much value is AI really creating?How much value is AI really creating?

this comes on the back of a calculation that using Fable (Anthropic’s fancy new model) to replace a full-time employee (40h/week) would result in a $1.1M+ annual cost

and that companies are blowing their AI annual budgets in only a few months

this doesn’t make me less bearish on AI as a technology, but i do think it’s an important data set in the sea of AI hype (taking everyone’s jobs, making overnight millionaires, etc).

one thing that i’m certain of: we are still in the phase of vc-subsidized ai 🤪 so i am taking advantage of it as much as i can until it becomes even more $$$

Every week I highlight a few of my favorite startups that I personally think are really promising. They’ve typically received funding that week + are hiring, and occasionally I’ll include some special bonus ones.

And now you can easily earn some cold hard cash 💰: you can now use Shortlist (a fun product my company has been building) to earn $$ (anywhere from $5K to $30K) for successfully referring people to top startups. The brilliant part about this is:

you don’t even need to know the person who’s ultimately hired - if you post a link on LinkedIn and the algorithm shows it to someone who ultimately clicks the link and is hired, you get the $$$ 😏
all of these companies are great and highly respected, so your friend (or random person who saw your post) will also thank you 😉 win win

(PS are you a founder or do you work at a cool startup that’s hiring? reply back with the name so we can give you guys a shout!)

This week’s featured companies:

Flourish: A brain-inspired AI company building systems that learn continuously while using far less energy than large language models. The New York-based startup raised $500 million at a $2.5 billion post-money valuation from investors including Jeff Bezos.
- Job openings can be found here
Prometheus: An AI company building tools that do for physical engineering what LLMs did for text — a next-generation platform that can design jet engines, medical devices, and consumer electronics. Co-founded by Jeff Bezos and Stanford professor Vik Bajaj, the company raised a $12 billion Series B at a $41 billion valuation.
- Job openings can be found here
ICEYE: A Finnish satellite company building radar satellites that can image the Earth through clouds, darkness, and smoke. The company raised a €450 million (~$487 million) Series F at a €10 billion+ valuation led by General Atlantic.
- Job openings can be found here

Some bonus companies that were also funded last week:

Supabase (open-source AI backend) 💾 → $500M Round (Job openings here)
PointFive (cloud spend optimization) 💸 → $60M Growth (Job openings here)
Morpho (blockchain lending markets) ⛓️ → $175M Round (Job openings here)
Poetic (enterprise workflow AI) ⚙️ → $50M Round (Job openings here)
Odessia Travel (AI travel agent) ✈️ → $6M Round (Job openings here)
Ramp (corporate expense mgmt) 💳 → $750M Round (Job openings here)
Standard Bots (AI industrial robots) 🤖 → $200M Series C (Job openings here)

All the best things I’ve read this week

We Can’t Let My Former Venture Capital Colleagues Buy Off Our Democracy (NYT): highly recommend this read written by an ex-GP at an influential vc firm about why he quit.
ai as a technology could be amazing, but evidenced by the poor reception of ai by the average american (compared to places like china where the reception is a lot more positive), it’s clear the way ai is being rolled out / how money is being spent to advocate for ai / how ai is being talked about in the media etc is contributing to this poor reception

Meet the SpaceX Employees Who Are About to Make an Overnight Fortune (WSJ): on the power of equity 💪
“The beneficiaries include not just engineers and other white-collar workers, but the legions of technicians who build the company’s rockets, as well as baristas and other salaried employees who work at SpaceX campuses in California, Texas and Florida. Some have held on to stakes that were valued at less than $2 a share when they were granted, and the company hadn’t yet landed a rocket. Stock splits over the years increased people’s holdings as the company’s value skyrocketed.”
I asked for new book/podcast recs (especially as someone who likes deeply researched, interesting narratives) and you delivered! Examples of things I’ve loved (and highly rec): All listed in my Amazon and individually linked below (please note that I may receive a commission from the below links)

books i’ve read & loved:
1. imminent (inside the pentagon’s hunt for UFO’s)
2. the spy and the the traitor
3. American kingpin (maybe my favorite book ever)
4. the snakehead / the empire of pain (also reading Say Nothing rn by the same author!)
5. bad blood
6. in the dark (s2)
7. the telepathy tapes
8. s town
your recs:
1. BOOKS:
  1. The Devil in the White City – Erik Larson (x3)
  2. London Falling – Patrick Radden Keefe (x3)
  3. Say Nothing – Patrick Radden Keefe
  4. Empire of Pain – Patrick Radden Keefe
  5. Mother of God – Paul Rosolie
  6. Nuclear War: A Scenario – Annie Jacobsen
  7. An Immense World – Ed Yong
  8. A World Appears
  9. Season of the Witch
  10. The Boy Captive
  11. Dark Wire – Joseph Cox
  12. Once a Gun Runner (the War Dogs story)
  13. The Years of Lyndon Johnson – Robert Caro (x2)
  14. The Secret Life of Groceries – Benjamin Lorr
  15. Mastermind – Evan Ratliff
  16. Midnight in Chernobyl – Adam Higginbotham
  17. The Hot Zone – Richard Preston
  18. Into Thin Air – Jon Krakauer
  19. Original Sin
  20. Red Notice – Bill Browder (x2)
  21. Chip War – Chris Miller
  22. Chaos – Tom O’Neill
  23. Everything Is Tuberculosis – John Green
  24. Martyr! – Kaveh Akbar
  25. A Spy Among Friends – Ben Macintyre
  26. The Irregulars (Roald Dahl as a spy)
2. PODCASTS / SHOWS
  1. Acquired
  2. Hidden Brain
  3. Hot Money & Deep Cover (Pushkin)
  4. Proof: Murder at the Warehouse
  5. Bed of Lies (S2)
  6. Behind the Bastards
  7. Darknet Diaries
  8. Morbid (x2)
  9. Moonshots
  10. The Semi Authentic
  11. Dr. Death (x2 - I also love this)
  12. Revisionist History - Malcolm Gladwell
  13. Dwarkesh Podcast
  14. 80,000 Hours
  15. Master Plan (campaign finance history)
  16. My First Million / Founders (I also listen to both)
  17. The Why Files (YouTube)
  18. Aubrey Marcus / Chase Hughes (DMT episodes)

All the most important things that happened last week, from intellectual to guilty pleasure and optimistic to cringe:

SpaceX IPO — $75B, Musk Becomes First Trillionaire: SpaceX priced at $135/share on June 12 and raised $75 billion (the largest U.S. IPO in history !!). Shares jumped 19% on Day 1 to $161, pushing market cap above $2 trillion and making Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire ($1.1T net worth).
1. Underrated: i want to hear more about gwynne shotwell (!), spacex’s president + coo (and now billionaire 🙃)
  
  Elon Musk@elonmusk
  2:27 PM · Jun 12, 2026 · 25.7M Views
  5.68K Replies · 18.4K Reposts · 157K Likes
Anthopic launched Fable (yay) and shortly after got banned (boo)
1. 💸Fable is incredible but expensive — $100/month Max plan drained in under 9 minutes. Devs shared screenshots of single prompts wiping daily quotas
2. 🕵️️”Secret sabotage” scandal — Developers found hidden model self-downgrade behavior buried in a 319-page system card
3. 🚫 Government ban— Commerce Dept ordered Anthropic on June 12 to suspend Fable 5 + Mythos 5 for all foreign nationals (including its own employees…). This happened after Amazon’s Andy Jassey shared that their team was able to get the model to provide information about cyberattacks that should’ve been restricted. (Some people blame Anthropic itself, saying its fear-mongering finally caught up with them)

[new experiment!] every week I want to highlight cool projects, opportunities, fundings, etc from this community! these are free and are curated for things that are the most helpful/inspiring/interesting for other members of this group. for more context and to submit any cool projects etc, please see here! (they’ll be reviewed on a rolling basis every Sunday(ish))

(Please note a feature here is not an explicit endorsement unless specifically stated — I do light diligence but given time/resource constraints, am not doing rigorous diligence (so please do your own research before spending lots of time and money, etc.)

for founders looking to increase their social media (and particularly linkedin presence) especially if you don’t have a lot of time, check out The Posting Guide by Douglas Satkey!
an app for travel recs that don’t depend on generic google/tripadvisor reviews! Valore by Madison Neri: a social discovery app that surfaces hotel recommendations from communities you actually trust (your friends, your coworkers, your favorite online groups, people with your taste)

aka random things that I found interesting enough to screenshot or take a picture of last week

spent a lot of time in the car this weekend on the way to the beach and binged this entire series of patrick radden keefe (same author as empire of pain, the snakeheads, and tons of my reading recs above) exploring a conspiracy theory that the song ‘wind of change’ by the scorpoions (v popular in Russia) was actually a planted song by the CIA
such a good listen (thought-provoking, well researched, entertaining aka all you could ask for):